That video is a wildly popular medium to publish content on the web, of course.

At the same time, attention spans seem to be shrinking. People love watching video, but time is very precious. Shorter videos tend to perform better since they demand less of your audience.

If you produce short-form content (5 minutes or less), you’re on your way to capturing viewers.

But of all the millions of videos online, you’re going to need an edge to make yours stand out from the crowd.

Here are five tips to amplify the search presence of your short-form videos using your video’s own transcript and captions.

1. Add an On-Page Video Transcript

The simplest option is to copy and paste your video transcript directly into the body of the video page. This ensures that all the transcript text is crawled by search engine bots, since the body text is a key factor in determining keyword relevance.

You can also place the full transcript in a <div> or a re-sizeable <textarea> text box in order to constrain the dimensions for visual effect.

The advantage of this method is that it’s easy to do and to maintain. The disadvantages are that it takes up valuable real estate on the page and potentially diverts attention from the video.

Another disadvantage is that Google is more likely to classify your page as a text page rather than a video page. A video page can be displayed as a rich snippet with a thumbnail in search results, which drastically increases click-through rates.

Consider whether your video supports other content on the page or if it’s the main focus of the page. If the latter is true, try one of these other options.

2. Link to a Separate Transcript Page

If you’d rather keep your video page focused on the multimedia content, you can publish the transcript on a separate page and offer a link underneath the video. This is a common solution for audio files published online (see above example of This American Life’s website).

Publishing a dedicated page for a transcript is a great way to build your site size, giving bots more content to crawl.

It also opens up new cross-linking opportunities. You can cross-link between the video and transcript pages, plus you can highlight appropriate text in the transcript and link it to relevant pages on your site. This option makes a lot of sense for long-form video transcripts, but can also be done with short-form transcripts.

3. Add an Interactive Transcript

Can Google See Your Transcript?

1. Right click on any page containing an interactive transcript or captions plugin.
2. Select View Page Source.
3. Looking at the code, use the find function (CTRL-F) to scan the code for a phrase from your transcript.

Interactive transcripts keep viewers engaged while watching your video, and provide a quick and easy way to navigate the content. They can transform the user experience for your video, leading to increased watch time and longer time on site.

These factors, along with positive UX in general, can contribute to better search rank.

4. Add Video Markup for Schema

Google, Bing, and Yahoo have all voiced support for schema.org video markup.

The standard schema markup uses the VideoObject to assist Google in understanding what the video content is about. This allows video publishers to add video metadata directly in the body of the HTML.

The VideoObject supports a number of properties, including the ability to add a transcript.

Schema markup is not visible to users, but is readily indexable by search engines.

The schema markup example below shows how a video transcript can be added to a video embed code.

One significant advantage of adding schema markup is that it facilitates having multiple videos (and their respective transcripts) on a single web page.

It’s generally a good idea to give each video its own web page because video sitemaps make it difficult to index multiple videos on one page. However, video schema markup could be an effective workaround, especially in cases where you have multiple videos aligned on a specific topic.

Another benefit of adding schema markup is that it will increase the likelihood that your video will appear as a rich snippet in Google Video Search. Rich snippets enjoy very high click-through rates in SERPs. While most videos in Google Video SERPs are YouTube videos, your web page can potentially rank with the help of schema.

Note that schema video markup does not replace a video sitemap, which is still the most reliable way for Google to discover and index your videos.

5. Add Closed Captions in HTML5

HTML5 standards make it much easier to add text track data to videos. The best part? HTML5 natively supports video without the need for third party plugins, so it’s the closest thing to universal online video you can get.

A video can be added to a web page using the video element, which is about as simple as adding an image.

The track element can then be used to display closed captions, subtitles, text video descriptions, chapter markers, or other time-aligned metadata.

2 Responses to 5 Ways to Improve SEO for Short Videos Using Transcripts & Captions

Hi Emily, this is a good write up and exactly what I was looking for. Is there a wordpress plugin for Option 1? I would like to start embedding my videos with a transcript, but would like them to be hidden by default unless a reader expands the box to read it.

Hi Allan! I’m not aware of any such WordPress plugin, but something might be out there. One thing to note about having a hidden/expandable transcript is that you will not get the full SEO benefit of that content. It appears that Google devalues pages with accordion or collapsible content, so your best bet is to display the full text of the transcript on your page.